Calvin Chess

How many of you have read "Calvin and Hobbes"? You should know what this is.

I did not know where to post this, so I put it here.

Calvin Chess

Set-up

1)Set up a normal chess game

2) Each player writes an objective on a piece of paper. These objectives may be anything as long as they are (a) not player specific and (b) invovle only the chess board and pieces (but needn't be normally possible in chess).

3) Player 2 writes down one rule on a piece of paper that allows Player 1 to make a move

4) Each player takes a turn making a move and writning a rule down

Rule Limitations

Every rule must be non-player specific and allow victory (but a rule pertaining to bishops when one player has no bishops left is fine. Resurrection, occupation of the points instead of squares, teleporting around, square-specific rules, and tipping pieces, moving multiple pieces, etc.. is fine)

A rule may include as many "conditions" (you know, if..., as long as..., etc...) as they want (provided none are player specific) but may contain only one (1) of the following:

Action (allows the player to do something)

Consequence (something that effects non-acted-upon pieces)

Errata (something that expains collisions between two seperate rules)

If two rules contradict and have no "Errata" rule to explain what happens, assume the negative (that piece can NOT be captured/moved/etc...)

If a rule states something like "any piece next to this one is tipped over at the end of the turn" then it does not come into effect until the end of the NEXT player's turn. "Beginnig of turn" rules do not occur until the same player's turn begins again.

This game could be played with checkers, or even monopoly, but chess seemed like the most obvious starting point. A game for game designers ;)

Are you indicating that a rule about pawns applies to both players pawns?

Other than being chaotic (though, that is to be expected), I think it works fine. So long as a rule affects both players equally (no "All white pieces are removed from the board at the start of that player's turn")... it should be fine.

Precisely, but square-based/postioning based rules are fine. If I make a rule that says a square I occupy lets that piece jump all-over the board, then the other player could either (A) make it so while they occupy ANOTHER square than my piece losses this advantage, of (B) take the square themself.

Note, however, that the chess rules do NOT apply.

And, while I have not tested it at all, fo any game, it should work with all, so you can get different kinds of pieces out to change the kinds of rules being made.

There's an amusing game similar to this called Guess. You have two players, playing black and white chess pieces, and a number of observers. The observers divide the chess pieces between them (so one takes pawns, the other knights and bishops, etc.) Each observer decides on the rules for moving that piece.

The players then play a game where each makes moves in turn. To make a move, they indicate a piece and where they want to move it to. If they're allowed to make that move, they make it, if not, they keep suggesting moves until they find one they can make. The first player to capture their opponants king wins.

Actually, the reason I came up with this is the real game I am working on (this doesn't count). Basically, there is a set of cards with different rules on them and the players take turns moving and playing a card. Not as Imaginiative, but allows for more complex and interesting rules (all the rules here would have to be very, very simple).

Yeah, this would be a logical extension to Knightmare Chess, which merely adjusts how the specific chess pieces would move. The next step is to remove all associations from the pieces, although I would note that ithat is one of those things that sounds easy in theory but remarkably difficult to do in practise: if you are presented with a chess board with pieces on it, then not treating them as such requires considerable mental effort...

Actually, I think that chess is a little too limiting for this. Try a big war game, with all the little dinky pieces, or mostly resource-based games (like monopoly) and you will probably get interesting results.

I tried this with my mother using a game called "Doubles Wild", if any of you know it, and the game was rather fast, with interesting results, rule-wise. The only downside is that each rule is so tiny, the game has barely begun before it ends (though that is sometimes good, gameplay wise).

Maybe, if each player were allowed two or three rules, or if you had more players, you could end up with a more interesting game at the end. Good for getting ideas, though, I believe.

Thank you for all the feed-back, I had never heard of , was it "Knightmare chess"?, very interesting. I will have to try it.

I appear to have failed this every time I explain the rules. I will put it in the next copy I show someone.

You must acheive BOTH objectives.

Alright, and to your second question, you are not thinking this all the way through. I played a game were my opponent made a rule about any piece on row 8 (black's start row, my start row) were destroyed at the end of every turn. I now have two options:

1) I can buy time simply by writing a rule like "pieces on row 8 are invulnerable". Then he would have to expend an entire rule just overriding my rule.

2) I could do what I did do, which was allow my pieces to be ressurected (but I messed up and had them ressurrect themselves right back where they were, so they died and I ended up losing the game).

Basically, you can't make a rule your opponent doesn't have the time to react to (which they do with most all rules).

This is just a form of Nomic. Nomic is the basis for more structured varients, like Knightmare Chess and Fluxx. I'm not certain, but I seem to remember it was first proposed in the early 70's in Scientific American, but really, don't quote me on that.

The problem with these sorts of activities -notice, I didn't say game- is that the vagaries of spoken language make them possible to break at will. As Godel's Theorem states, every logical structure contains a statement that steps outside the logical structure itself. Given that this is the case, a clever player could, at any time, derail the entire effort.

The exception to this is fixed rules sets, such as Fluxx. The problem here is that the moving target of the goal is in no way guaranteed to be reachable at any given turn. Thus, there's really no wy of guaranteeing that the game is winnable. This doesn't make for a riveting experience, since the players really never know when the game will suddenly end, and so it's impossible to say if their intervening plays have any impact on the game. Since this is the case, Fluxx and others like it aren't really games at all, since the players arguably have no inherent ability to advance toward the goal.

Knightmare Chess is a fixed rules set as well, but, given the ablative set of pieces, play does indeed move forward.

The varient given above, however, is too close to "pure Nomic" to be useable, as a few attempts would quickly show.